Like the other volumes in The Once and Future King, The Queen of Air and Darkness begins with an epigraph: "When shall I be dead and rid / Of the wrong my father did? / How long, how long, till spade and hearse / Put to sleep my mother's curse?"
The pleading questions asked here are never directly posed by the Wart (now King Arthur) in the novel; however, the sense of the "sins of the fathers" affecting the son — and the past affecting the present — is a chief component of the Arthurian legend (and White's retelling of it). Throughout The Queen of Air and Darkness, Arthur struggles to reform and "civilize" the bloody nation (torn by racial strife) left to him by his father, Uther Pendragon. However, as White implies before the book even begins, the time when Arthur will be "dead and rid" of the troubles engendered by his father's (and other Normans') tyranny may be slow in coming — or never arrive at all. The focus of the novel is war, but the war fought here is one that has origins in the distant past. To "put to sleep" the problems plaguing his country, Arthur revolutionizes his own (and other characters') thinking about wars, their origins, and who fights in them. Seen in this light, The Queen of Air and Darkness is, like The Sword in the Stone, a tale of Arthur's education. As he learned of the horrors of war in the first volume, he puts his learning into practice in the second, attempting to actually eradicate war completely from his nation.
